|
Six Army Ranger trainees head out into a hurricane exercise along with Sgt. West (Samuel L.
Jackson). When they fail to rendezvous at their pickup point, the base commander (Tim Daly) searches for them by helicopter. From that vantage point, he spots Dunbar (Brian
Van Holt) carrying badly wounded Kendall (Giovanni Ribisi), then he witnesses Dunbar exchange gunfire with another recruit, Mueller (Dash Mihok), killing the latter. Back at the
base, neither Dunbar nor Kendall is willing to talk to investigating officer Capt. Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen). So Tom Hardy (John Travolta), an ex Ranger who served under West
and has a reputation of getting even the least reluctant soldiers to talk, is brought in to discover what happened in the dark rainy jungles of Panama. Both Dunbar and
Kendall admit Sgt. West and the other trainees are dead, but their stories don't match as to who did what to whom. So other means of getting the truth have to be
employed.
Basic basically
fails in almost all aspects of storytelling. It may hold the audience interest for a moment. But the plot is so convoluted with so many twists and turns, eventually losing
the audience's interest instead of holding them. The superficial screenplay is unable to penetrate the minds of the viewers the way a suspense movie should do. Even the
flashback device from different points of view confuses the audience even more to a point that the story doesn't make any sense to them. The performances of the actors are
uniformly uninspired which are nothing more than typical if not stereotypical. Basic goes nowhere, without any new insight whatsoever, and is nothing but a tiresome and
utterly forgettable experience.
Basic may simply want to reiterate a point on the ambiguity of truth. A theme that is very applicable in our time when nobody seems to tell the truth. Or maybe the question still is whether or not the human race is able to handle truth. After all the stories are told in different perspectives, and after lives are unjustly wasted, here comes somebody like Capt. Osborne who's more than willing to give her all just to uphold truth and justice, but ends up mocked and insulted. Our society needs more heroes, the likes of Capt. Osborne, who's willing to go an extra mile to discover truth for the greater good. Murder is basic, so Hardy says in the movie. But in the end, it's not just murder that becomes basic in the movie, but telling lies without remorse as well.
(Date Reviewed: September 19, 2003)
|
